communications planning

I was reading today how media companies are obsessed with reaching Millennials through TV advertising. Anyone with a Millennial in the family knows they’re multitaskers. Millennials are the reason Twitch Point Planning was developed. (Twitches are media moments when one switches media or device in search of more information. Twitch Point Planning is a communication planning technique where you “understand, map and manipulate” consumers closer to a sale.)

This is Upfront Week — where media companies showcase new shows trying to sell ad time before the season begins. It got me thinking about Twitch Point Planning again. For proper utilization of Twitch Point Planning with TV you have to anticipate what audiences will do while watching a particular show. Let’s say you are watching a classic airing of the movie Bullet, what do you think happens on Google when the car chase scene takes place? Como se dice “Mustang?” Or what happens when Claire Underwood is using her rowing machine? “Gym membership? Yoga pants?”

Real-time Twitch intercepts during airings of TV shows are big sales opportunities. Google understands this, but hasn’t done anything with it. (Yet.) Media companies and ad agencies need to get on board. But to do so they will actually have to watch the shows and plot the potential twitches. It’s a cross medium play, but it’s the way Millennials work.

I was reading today how media companies are obsessed with reaching Millennials through TV advertising. Anyone with a Millennial in the family knows they’re multitaskers. Millennials are the reason Twitch Point Planning was developed. (Twitches are media moments when one switches media or device in search of more information. Twitch Point Planning is a communication planning technique where you “understand, map and manipulate” consumers closer to a sale.)

This is Upfront Week — where media companies showcase new shows trying to sell ad time before the season begins. It got me thinking about Twitch Point Planning again. For proper utilization of Twitch Point Planning with TV you have to anticipate what audiences will do while watching a particular show. Let’s say you are watching a classic airing of the movie Bullet, what do you think happens on Google when the car chase scene takes place? Como se dice “Mustang?” Or what happens when Claire Underwood is using her rowing machine? “Gym membership? Yoga pants?”

Real-time Twitch intercepts during airings of TV shows are big sales opportunities. Google understands this, but hasn’t done anything with it. (Yet.) Media companies and ad agencies need to get on board. But to do so they will actually have to watch the shows and plot the potential twitches. It’s a cross medium play, but it’s the way Millennials work.

Experience is hot marketing word these days. It is rooted me thinks in user experience (UX), which started in the early days of the web when sites were hard to navigate and not intuitive. Ad and digital agencies caught on to experience a few years later as a way to create new buildables (content) and garner planning fees It didn’t hurt that “customer journey” and “communications planning” were smart ideas to begin with.

Product experience, some will have you believe, starts with communications and ends with the after-sale. The experience is everything in between. A lot of product experience buildables – designed to follow the AIDA principle: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action — are online and in-store. But product gesture is different.

Product gesture is not so much about the product journey and surround as it is the “consuming experience.” (See my last blog post.) A product gesture is the olfactory response that occurs when you drive by a Burger King. It’s why “flame broiled” is such a powerful brand asset of BK. For Coke, whose long standing brand idea is refreshment, the moment when your head snaps back after a full swig of a newly opened Coke is induced by the product gesture. Google’s product gesture occurs during search when your problem is solved, you smile and twitch to act.

Every product has a gesture. Man-made gestures like the Stella Artois pour and glass are distant seconds, but they are gestures nonetheless.

Find your product gesture and you will find marketing and branding success.

The 4 Ps of marketing have always been sacrosanct. If you don’t take care of the Product, Price, Place and Promotion, you aren’t paying attention to the total marketing mix. You can certainly be successful without attending to all 4, but it won’t sustain. For the last 10 years I’ve had this gnawing feeling that the web has altered the 4Ps, but haven’t been able to put my finger on in. I’ve written how the web has collapsed the steps to a sale (awareness, interest, desire and action) into a single one-experience process — certainly a big change — but has it really changed the 4 Ps?

I was reading a Slideshare by Translation’s John Greene today on disruption in the music business and landed on a point about “transaction”…which gave me pause. Readers who know my “Twitch Point Planning” thesis, know twitches used properly, can lead to or be transactions. Communications planners know the value of the transaction. Is it possible that transaction can replace the Place P? Place being the channel, e.g., the retail store, mail order, ecomm website, mobile device? Or should transaction be added to the 4Ps?

As technology plays with place and pricing and makes purchases as convenient as a swipe, scan or click, the transaction may trump all other Ps. Are we as brand planners and comms planners thinking enough about the transaction? Thoughts me droogies?

Twitch Point Planning is a communications planning technique I discuss with clients to get them to “understand, map and manipulate” media consumption in a way that moves viewers closer to a sale. Twitch Points are called such because today’s tools make it way too easy to multitask and twitch away from one media form to another. Un-planned, this can be a bad thing. Planned, it is a good thing.

I was reading about Conde Naste’s biggest iPad success today, with The New Yorker magazine. 75,000 paid magazine subscribers have downloaded the iPad app and 20,000 people are subscribing via the app alone. As one looks at the behavior of The New Yorker readers (the first part of understand, map and manipulate) it is clear that these readers are there to read. They don’t want to twitch away to Wikipedia to look up authors, or watch YouTube videos of punk bands inspired by the authors. Readers of The New Yorker want to read and don’t care to be spammed away. So, here’s an iPad app for New Yorker readers: automatically send incoming calls to voicemail. Hee hee. Peace!

Brand planning, marketing planning, communications planning and account planning are all discrete disciplines — but really, they are also the same. It’s really in the packaging.

If you take the word “planning” away from these labels, what you are left with, truthfully, is marketing. Sergio Zyman once defined marketing as “selling more stuff, to more people, more times, at higher prices.” If the brand plan helps you do that, you win. If the marketing plan delivers. Win. The communications plan? Win again.

Planners, no matter what their title, look at information, data and behavior and key in on selling insights. Then they boil down those insights until left with the most important insight – the most sales-effective insight for the brand. This forms the branding idea. With a powerful branding idea, you can plan and plan and plan. And label it whatever you like. The reality is, it’s marketing.

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